What is that repetitive job costing you?
Pick one job somebody does by hand every week. Three numbers, and you get what it costs a week, a month and a year, plus what would come back if the manual part shrank.
One job at a time. “Our admin” is too broad to cost honestly; “retyping WhatsApp enquiries into the sales sheet” is the right size. If you are guessing at the hours, guess low.
One person, one normal week. If it is twenty minutes a day, that is about 1.7.
Count everyone the job passes through, including you.
A monthly wage divided by 176 gives the hourly figure for a full-time month. Add NSSF, NHIF and airtime if you want the real cost rather than the wage.
Optional. Fill this in and the table below adds a payback column. Leave it empty and it stays out of the way.
What this does and does not tell you
A calculator that produces a large annual figure is easy to build and easy to distrust. These are the four things that would make the number above wrong, stated before you act on it.
The four caveats, in full
- Freed hours are capacity, not cash
- Nobody pays you the annual figure at the end of the year. The hours come back into the week, and what they are worth depends on what fills them. If the answer is more of the same admin, the saving is zero.
- The hourly cost is whatever you put in
- If you enter a bare wage, the result is a bare wage. Add NSSF, NHIF, airtime, supervision and the cost of the person's downtime if you want the number to reflect what the hour really costs you.
- Nothing here prices the fix
- The reduction scenarios say what would be freed at 30, 50 and 70 per cent. They do not say any of those is achievable for your process, and they do not include what a system costs to build or to run each month.
- Estimates in, estimates out
- Almost nobody knows their real hours until they time them. If you are guessing, guess low and time it for a week before you act on the number.
The arithmetic, so you can check it
There is no model here and nothing is fitted to any data. Four lines, in order:
- Hours a weekHours one person spends, multiplied by the number of people.
- Cost a weekThose hours multiplied by the hourly cost you entered.
- Month and yearThe weekly figure times 4.333 for a month (52 weeks divided by 12, not 4, or the annual figure would not equal the monthly one times twelve), and times 52 for a year.
- The scenariosThe annual figure multiplied by 30, 50 and 70 per cent. Nothing predicts which, if any, is achievable for your process.
The salary helper divides a monthly wage by 176, which is eight hours across twenty-two working days. Use your own figure if your month is different.
Why we published a tool that can talk you out of hiring us
Most of the jobs people run through this turn out to cost less than they feared, and the honest answer for those is to leave them alone. We would rather you find that out here, free, than three weeks into a project. The ones that come back large are the conversations worth having, and they start better when both sides already agree on the number.
If the figure is large, the next question is not what it costs but whether the job can be automated at all. That is what the AI Opportunity Check is for, and four of its six possible answers are reasons not to build anything.
Where to go from here
Where do you want to start?
A website that brings in no enquiries. A business nobody finds on Google. The same job done by hand every week. Tell us which one it is.
Have a project in mind? Send an enquiry.
- Free 30-minute call
- No obligation
- Talk to a person, not a bot
- We publish our prices